Burrows and Ayhan

The articles discussed here focus on genetic manipulations to determine the origin of schizophrenia. Burrows et. al (2015) tested how the metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 affects schizophrenia, and whether or not enriched environment can impact behavioral tests like prepulse inhibition, memory deficits and locomotor activity. While this paper did show that mGlu5 was important for the development of schizophrenia and enriching the environment can help with the symptoms, I found it less applicable than Ayhan et. al (2011).

Ayhan et. al (2011) used mutant DISC1 prenatally, postnatally and throughout development to show the origin of schizophrenia. They found effects for every situation, some that overlapped and some that were different depending on the time of expression. The mutant DISC1 led to decreased dopamine in the cortex and parvalbumin + neurons in any of the three situations (pre, post and pre+post), while prenatal DISC1 showed less effect throughout the rest of the paper. Ayhan et. al (2011) largely found that post or pre+post mutant DISC1 had significant effects on the animal behavior, and the pre mutant had more effects on morphology.

I found these results to be interesting, because they emphasized the slight differences in the effects of pre and postnatal mutant DISC1, and I thought they showed how timing of gene expression affects behavior and diagnosis. I also really enjoyed how they incorporated sex differences in the study and noted that some responses and brain structures were different based on the gender of the animal. I thought it was interesting how they hypothesized that mutant DISC1 could affect neuronal maturation differently depending on when it was presented. This was really interesting because it’s not something that researchers always do, and I thought the fact that Ayhan et. al (2011) actually found differences in morphology and behavior was very telling. I would be extremely interested to see if this translates into human studies and whether this could impact how scientists approach schizophrenia.